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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.
Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.
The burden to prove that she was not insane has been on the prosecution, so the legal argument here might be sound. It seems like a weird way to trial murders though. Why doesn't every murderer in Massachusetts just go for the insanity defense? Such an assertion seems impossible to conclusively disprove in most cases.
I don't think our insanity defenses are really as coherent as I'd like them to be. I don't have a much better proposal, but the combination of "no sane person willfully kills another (involuntarily, to disclaim euthanasia)" and "it's only murder if it's done by someone sane in the moment", neither of which strike me as incontrovertibly wrong at an axiomatic level, implies "murder is not a commit-able crime", which strikes me as obviously wrong.
Any recommendations on how we're supposed to square that circle?
And that's in addition to dramatic unclarity about "reasonable doubt" and P-values (the law seems to refuse to specify a number). I can only hope if I'm charged with a crime to have a particle physicist on my jury for whom five sigma (
p < 3e-7) is a reasonable threshold for conclusions.Right now, the secret "real system" seems to be that the both sides will make a highly emotional argument, and then the jurors go and decide however they want. Jury selection is by far the most important factor, and written legal precedent means very little. Hooray.
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The simple answer is flipping the burden of proof. Institute a presumption of sanity just like there is a presumption of innocence. The blackbox nature of what precisely happened in your head at the scene, probably makes proving insanity so hard that it's basically only possible if you recently escaped a psych ward. Is that really acceptable though, if it means that you miss a lot of people who legitimately were not in control of themselves when it happened?
You could also keep the burden on the prosecution but reduce the criteria to "more likely than not". "It is most likely she was sane as we see evidence of planning, prior abuse, etc."
Or you could combine the two and shift the burden to the defense, but all they have to prove is that she was more likely than not to be psychotic. Show that she had a history of past episodes and no history of abusing the kids. Or something like that. This still leaves the issue of how responsible she was in managing her illness. It sounds like she may have been doctor shopping and stopping her medication without medical guidance. In that case, I would imagine there is an argument that she knowingly caused this risk for her kids and should at least be held somewhat liable for what happened.
lol
This is what about half of US states have done. The burden is on the defense, but it's a "Preponderance of Evidence" burden instead of beyond reasonable doubt. This would be my preference but unfortunately not the standard here.
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